Merging E-Mail and Social Networking, Yahoo Tries to Avoid Google's Mistakes

Merging E-Mail and Social Networking, Yahoo Tries to Avoid Google's Mistakes - Newsweek

In February, Yahoo got to watch with schadenfreude as Google drove its new Buzz social network straight over a cliff with inadequate privacy controls. Now Yahoo has decided it wants to head for pretty much the same cliff, just with a slightly firmer grip on the wheel.

Yahoo is beefing up its Yahoo Updates service, a relatively unknown social network that allows users to post status updates, photos, and other content by integrating it directly into Yahoo Mail. The numbers make a compelling case: Yahoo Mail has some 280 million users, so if the Sunnyvale, Calif., company can flip a switch and create a social network around that—why, it'd be a sudden player against Facebook, a global force at nearly 500 million users, and Twitter, at 75 million.

No doubt that is the same thought that occurred to Google when it introduced Buzz as an add-on to its popular Gmail service. That launch didn't go so well. Yahoo is paying close attention to the litany of mistakes Google made, especially the flaw that allowed some users' lists of frequently e-mailed contacts to go public. The privacy outcry then was swift and loud, with journalists whose confidential sources were revealed, as well as battered spouses whose ex-husbands suddenly saw their status updates, among those affected. Yahoo says it has been slowly adding Updates functionality to its various products—Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Profiles—and studying how users respond. This "phased integration," Yahoo says, has elicited "overwhelmingly positive feedback."